Friday, March 14, 2008

More about mobility

On a few occassions in the past I have blogged about reveiwing geocaches while "on the road" at exotic locations such as Cozumel, The Bahamas and Dyersville. I did the reviewing by packing along my notebook computer, a Dell Inspiron and finding a wifi hotspot. Sometimes I used my wife's notebook, because she has nationwide broadband coverage. While this has worked fine for the most part, my computer is not the most convenient thing to lug around. It has a large screen and, as notebooks go, is not the most trim PC you could own. Well today I tried something new. For the first time I reviewed (and approved) a geocache using a mobile phone. Recently my wife upgraded her cell phone to get one with more bells and whistles so her old phone -- a Cingular 8125 -- was going unused. Even though I don't use it for phone service, I decided to charge up her old phone to see if I could use it to access the Internet via our home wifi. I logged into geocaching.com and reviewed a new cache called Drake Bulldogs Madness (GC1A395). Now I have a pocket-sized way to access the Internet, provided I'm in a free wifi hotspot. I'm looking forward to trying this out "on the road" sometime because it means I may not be lugging around my computer or relying on borrowing time on my wife's computer. Besides, it's fun to be geeky with gadgets.

11 comments:

Dyersville rocks! Mobility is great. Right now I'm in San Francisco for a convention, but this afternoon some co-workers and I are getting a car and heading north to Wine Country. I've got the Inspiron 6000 with air card along, so we ought to get some caches in, but a little bulky. As an aside, there are quite a few virtuals out here, one yesterday in a free mechanical museum of old coin-operated games, some back to the late 1800s, and very strange games, too, a real journey back in time. The cache is Laughing Sal's (GCBD0A); it's down by Fisherman's Wharf. Did another cache in a beautiful garden park that was basically on top of a parking garage!(GC11WJK) The cacher is a graphic artist/web designer/technical writer and she paints watercolors of many of the buildings as hints for her caches, and they're in the description and are really good, especially when you get there! Time for breakfast - it's great to get up at 6am, which is 8am back home:)BGT

Funny thing about that night in Dyersville..... I was "stranded" around 20 miles west of there. In Manchester, of all places.....

Actually, I had reserved a room there to get some caching done on my way up to spending Christmas with the family in a cabin at Backbone. I was just glad I was able to make it that far with how bad the roads got that afternoon! It was really tough caching will all the snow around....well, that is the excuse I am using for this episode of ISAC....

Fish, I thought it was "Icthyologist Striker & Cacher!"Ken, I would load PQs in advance. The area in wine country is so cache dense, that we actually OUTdrove two PQs I had loaded, and they were only for Traditional and Letterboxes, no multis, etc. I had an aircard, so I dragged the gc.com map around on the screen, but my "driver" went a tad faster than I could enter numbers in the GPSr,,,"Uh, we just passed one by .46 miles." Lots of easy stuff along the road with beautiful views. The Marin #1 on the rest area north of the Golden Gate is neat, too! With the convention underway now, I still managed two on Friday, 4 on Saturday and 8 yesterday in wine country. I found that vino does enhance caching somewhat, but apparently you should train before doing all those tastings at the wineries,,,dang!:)

It is actually shortened and combined from Games and Science. It started to mean something else when another cacher (3AMT) noticed how I whiffed at a first to find along with another cacher (The NVG (The Not Very Good?)). Anyway, 3AMT surmised that Gamsci actually meant Good At Making Simple Caches Impossible.

What others are saying about this blog

...it's interesting to know how people who approve caches think. Glad I came across your blog and I'll be watching for more!

Posted by justjohn, June 18, 2008:

I've just begun my foray into Geocaching here in Okinawa, Japan, and I was looking for a blog like this to help me.Your tips include things that I never would have thought of, even after reading the FAQ on geocaching.com Thanks again!

About Me

I've been geocaching since Feb. 2001, and I've been a reviewer since 2003. As a reviewer, I started out using the ID WGA2, but other reviewers have since used that ID for approving caches in Wisconsin so I started a new ID (IowaAdmin) in July 2005. My "regular" IDs are kbraband (for solo geocaching) and active2gether (for caches I find with my wife). While some reviewers believe in hiding their true identities, I don't do that. I believe that by working together with fellow geocachers to get caches approved according to the geocaching.com guidelines in a cordial and consistent manner, there should be no reason to keep my ID secret.